Amid his exhibition at Empty Gallery, Hong Kong, the Japanese bricolage photographer presents art as helping us sit with the discomfort of the unknown.
In the last essay he published before passing away on 23 October 2024, Gary Indiana wrote about photographs: “We all live at least one or two lives that we subtract from our biographies. Areas of un-revisited, unhealed pain or such monumental nothingness that they’re not worth remembering. Then, infrequently, some evidence turns up, often photographic evidence. You are seized, suddenly, by a grisly species of curiosity.”
Born in Japan and now living in New York, artist Taro Masushio’s exhibition “Pass” at Empty Gallery, Hong Kong is replete with photographic evidence, but contains little of facts and does not reward undue curiosity. Masushio’s reprinting of his father’s amateur travel photography on the cardboard of care packages shipped across the world from father to son conjures a haptic, material intimacy mediated by impersonal logistics networks. A series of sparing, high-contrast still-life photographs catalogues enigmatic objects sourced intuitively from his father’s belongings and the artist’s own collection – a book of Rimbaud’s poetry, a pair of male Ainu figurines, testosterone supplements, photo paper, a darkroom safe light. The effect is disruption of the impulse towards certainty in meaning-making, the recognizable objects utterly drained of their indexicality, despite their unambiguous familial, autobiographical, and sexual connotations.
“Just as he is uninterested in entrenching binaries of fact and fiction, resistance and capitulation, or authorship and appropriation, Taro Masushio is likewise wary of identitarian overdeterminations and the corollary imperative to verify and reveal any singular “truths” behind his photography. He sets himself the task of resisting the medium’s claims to the indisputable legibility of subjects in front of or behind its lens. His latest show at Empty Gallery, Hong Kong (all works 2024), juxtaposes two types of photography—UV prints on found cardboard and more traditional still lifes—to complicate the medium’s supposed technological purchase on truth and transparency. It highlights his proclivity for playful formal experimentation when faced with the camera’s potential for capture, which has often proven symptomatic of the colonial hunger for knowledge, order, and coherence. Through his shrewd sequencing of images, the artist seems to suggest that the medium of photography holds the capacity to conceal and equivocate, despite its presumed indexical fidelity to the “real.””
Empty Gallery is pleased to support Para Site’s 2024 Benefit Auction. The works by Doris Guo & Weili Wang and James T. Hong are available to view on 9/F of H Queen’s in Hong Kong through 17 November, the silent auction will continue through November 20, 10.30pm HKT.
In issue 141 of ArtAsiaPacific, deputy editor H.G. Masters covered James T. Hong’s Apologies, which was on view at Empty Gallery from June through August 2024.
At the Renaissance Society, Gork develops a new project for the Intermissions series in collaboration with performer, sound artist, and electronic musician Laetitia Sonami. Directly engaging with this unique setting, Gork introduces new physical elements into the empty gallery space, positions multiple sound sources, and experiments with the room’s unusual acoustics. For two days, Sonami and Gork mobilize and shape the sound within this environment across various listening zones. Visitors are free to come and go during the durational performance.
Curated by Karsten Lund with Michael Harrison
Special thanks to Meyer Sound, Berkeley, CA.
On the weekend of November 8-9, Winsome Wong will present ‘Love Song: the bittersweet crumbs of having them at home’ in collaboration with Vunkwan Tam and Annisa Cheung, at Tai Kwun’s HICCUP, a festival of body and sound co-presented by Tai Kwun Contemporary, Contemporary Musiking Hong Kong (Sound Forms), and Per.Platform.
For the full schedule, see the link below.
Doris Guo’s solo presentation, The Jar, is on view November 1st through 24th at K4 in Oslo, a non-profit gallery space for video art and moving image. The exhibition is open on Saturdays and Sundays, please see the link below for further details.
“The starting point of this exhibition was based on my desire for having always wanted to make a horror movie. At many periods of my life, especially busy and stressful ones, I take comfort in throwing on any horror movie, cheesy and predictable with familiar sounds and jump scares. Amongst the many horror tropes one might experience, I particularly get a lot of enjoyment out of police and military being utterly useless. It’s an assumed, natural fact of the characters and by the general audience. I wanted to set my horror movie in a particular style of housing in the Pacific Northwest.”
Cici Wu’s solo exhibition Travel Star Between Ceasing and Arising is now on view at Scheusal Berlin from October 26th onwards.
Jes Fan’s debut New York solo exhibition is now on view at Andrew Kreps Gallery’s 55 Walker space through December 20, 2024.
In his practice, Fan employs the often invisible substances that shape our experiences with the world to explore the often malleable ways in which biology, ecology and identity intersect. Working in close collaboration with biologists, farmers, and medical universities, Fan’s transdisciplinary projects examine how sculpture can be used as a tool to unravel material from its accumulated history.
The exhibition continues Fan’s episodic project Sites of Wounding, first initiated in 2020. A pool of boiling soy milk is positioned at the gallery’s entrance, and utilized as a projection surface for a visceral video documenting a homemade endoscopy. Upon looking at the congealed skin-like surface of the white liquid, the viewer is not offered a reflection, but instead offered an interior view of the artist’s body. This underscores a larger interest in Fan’s work, of collapsing the membrane that demarcates the external body from an internal space. New sculptures belonging to the project’s second chapter are informed by Fan’s research into Agarwood trees, as well as an interest in how injuries are capable of generating new meaning. Native to Hong Kong, the trees produce a fragrant resin in response to stress, and trauma. In the healing process, the tree’s fibers harden, building density and structure around the wound. To create sculptures in this chapter, Fan 3D prints CT scans of his own musculature and combines traditional techniques such as glass-blowing. Mimicking the formal qualities of the infected Agarwood tree, these abstracted forms point to the transformative potential of trauma carried by the human body. A punctured freestanding wall furthers this inquiry, inviting viewers to peer at the sculpture embedded within it.
Scientia Sexualis is an ambitious group survey of contemporary artists whose works take up the fraught relationship between sex, gender, and science. Organized by Jennifer Doyle (Professor of English, University of California, Riverside) and Jeanne Vaccaro (Assistant Professor of Transgender Studies and Museum Studies, University of Kansas), the exhibition is realized as part of the ambitious collaboration across arts institutions throughout Southern California known as PST ART: Art & Science Collide led by the Getty. It runs from October 5, 2024 through March 2, 2025.
Featured artists include: Panteha Abareshi, Dotty Attie, Louise Bourgeois, Nao Bustamante, Andrea Carlson, Demian DinéYazhi’, Nicole Eisenman, El Palomar, dean erdmann, Jes Fan, Nicki Green, Oliver Husain & Kerstin Schroedinger, Xandra Ibarra, KING COBRA (documented as Doreen Lynette Garner), Joseph Liatela, Candice Lin, Carlos Motta, Wangechi Mutu, Young Joon Kwak & Gala Porras-Kim, Cauleen Smith, P. Staff, Joey Terrill, Chris E. Vargas, Millie Wilson, and Geo Wyex.
Installation view of Xper. Xr: Bad Timing.
Courtesy of the artist and Empty Gallery
Photo: Michael Yu
繼 《Tailwhip》之後,Empty Gallery 再度為大家帶來與Xper.Xr 二度合作的展覽 《Bad Timing》,展出的是 Xper.Xr 在近三十年間首度發佈的全新創作。 Xper 在香港藝術史中的位置極具開創性及啟導性,但其成就卻一直被忽視;可以說,Xper 幾乎是以單人匹馬之力,肩負起工業音樂、無浪潮和噪音音樂共同傳承中所體現的激進個人主義和反威權主義的各種潛力在一個地區的整體表現。 《Bad Timing》中這位從未停步的煽動者重拾他擱置已久的繪畫實踐 (他前次展出畫作已是1991年在Quart Society的事),當中更出現一種反常及出人意表的轉向,直指社會人像圖。
受到香港近年因政府施政不當、政治衝突及精英棄責所帶來的低氣壓挑動, 這組全新畫作描繪一班傾向背棄公眾信義的國際社政作俑者:由金融專家、科技權威到宗教領袖。每幅人像作品皆相稱於其取自經典流行曲曲目的譏諷式標題(例如「 MTV Makes Me Want To Smoke Crack」),此可視為是 Xper在其職業生涯中對具代表性曲調假意翻唱的執迷延伸轉移到繪畫這個媒介之上,且同時把社會的權力行使與文化產業的運作深刻徹骨地聯繫起來。
取材自公開照片,Xper首先在由豬片拉展而成的圓面上繪畫指涉人物的相像,然後對這人像進行類儀式性塗污,這種表現主義式的朦朧處理,使得出來的畫面充滿了人造膿液、粘液和其他物質所造成的耀目沉積床。這些帶宣洩性(並且非常幽默)的糟蹋痕跡指向這些作品是出自私人表演的隱密領域。它們暗示自身的功能是作為 Xper (可能是失敗的)治療嘗試以從他心智景觀中驅除某些特定公眾人物所帶來的毒性影響——一種在個體經驗與媒體認可共識現實兩者間邊界日益多孔的文化時刻中強而有力的關聯脈衝。然而,如果這些畫作籍它們的表現力在姿態上指向一種理想的控制,在這樣做之時它們是充分了解到這只是一種出自青少年幻想式的簡單動作——缺乏任何真正的政治效力,帶出的只是以黑色至極的幽默作為潛在阻力的一種形式。
雖然《Bad Timing》展出的人像畫作為宣洩憤怒多少帶著真摯的出口可能發揮了很好的作用,但就如 Xper 其他的創作實踐般,它們充斥著矛盾和自我破壞、死路和拐錯彎:在私下操縱中成自動毀滅的悲喜劇物品。它們預演甚至沈醉於其自身的社政失敗,把批評——藝術資本最吹噓的形式——搬演為自我撕破的鬧劇。這組畫作與觀者及彼此交換著合謀的目光,作為一個整體它們又似乎表達出一種了解恐懼的感覺:鬼崇惡意的一種模仿,或是潛伏於宏莊詭計背後一種龐大而可怕共謀的輪廓。當其優雅地指使空間的中央位置讓路予迷宮般的黑暗時,《Bad Timing》 讓人聯想到社政的未來不僅已被取消了回贖權,並且以某種方式故意妥協了——受制於一種永遠潛伏在我們集體意識邊緣之外的幽暗共識。